“Trust is built with consistency.”
– LINCOLN CHAFEE
Your company is planning big enterprise level transformations in both business and IT. To prepare for these initiatives assigned teams have started to look at current enterprise model to understand simplified view of overall company’s environment.
However detailed analysis of the current business and IT estate highlighted that there is a big inconsistency of the modeling approach among different parts of organization. Some have a mature modeling capability, but others do not consider modeling as of importance.
Your challenge is to align the modeling approaches throughout the organization to enable the progress in company’s strategy implementation.
Architecture description support
Many organizations are often capable to choose modeling tools or educate staff on modelling languages as there are plenty of vendors waiting for this tender and there are many training courses outside. Still, when you want to shift the modeling practice from sandbox games into enterprise level modeling, the question arises: where do I start?
Common meta-model
First, we have to ensure that a common meta-model is selected to model the enterprise and select the modeling framework most suitable to organization and industry. Meta-model can be used as a reference taxonomy scheme for architecture concepts, models and views. It has to be represented in the way to support consistency, completeness and traceability. Modeling framework will provide structuring mechanism for architecture domains in relation of overall business environment.
Selected views and models
Then we update the architecture description templates in order to include relevant modeling sections and select a set of models (Lists, Matrices and Diagrams) that will be included in the design. The templates include solution description documents and business domain architecture description documents.
These descriptions will later be used to understand business and IT environment in consistent way.
Value
This simple set of actions will help organization to grow in architectural maturity and enable it to deploy a coherent methodology to design and govern different architecture domains throughout the whole enterprise.
Usage of systematic methods and common taxonomy allows organization to continue strategic initiatives with better decision making and lower risk level.